Toni Risson is writing a PhD thesis on lollies and their contribution to Australia and Australians, and on one score alone that is a sensible subject. Ms Risson, a Queensland author of children's books, makes the point that the first purchase made by most Australians will have been lollies. The buying, she says, taught us about value, weighing various factors and the process of reaching a decision.
Lollies were indeed my first purchase, and as it happens a purchase with my own money! I'd earn the threepence or sixpence by running to the shop (in those days we were never asked to walk to the shop, and we never did) and I have a sense still of the gravity of my deliberations at the glass counter. That was half a century ago and my judgement then that soft jubes were not worth the money because they didn't last long enough has stayed with me ever since. I remember buying Choo Choo Bars, packets of sherbet, fags that had a red tip and a filter colour at the other end, bull's eyes, bubble gum squares wrapped in paper, chewing gum in packs of four pillows, musk sticks, liquorice sticks, mint leaves, black cats, lovehearts and, of course, all-day suckers. My earliest memory is of a lolly, liquorice allsorts brought as a gift when I was two, maybe three, by my parents returning from the pictures. They're still a favourite.
Later came milk bottles, teeth, clouds, bullets, cobbers, snakes and pythons, jelly babies, jelly beans and gobstoppers, and much later came one of my firm favourites, Allen's red and green frogs. Over the years I developed combinations that I liked to think of as my own, among them paired musk and liquorice sticks, and a red and a green frog eaten together is much better than two of either. One of my workmates has ownership of the combination of a raspberry and a bullet.
Toni Risson is right, a lolly is an adventure, and I do think that even after half a century it is a little adventure still. What are your memories of lollies, and were they, are they, more than just a sweet interlude?
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